The Delano Marrakech Opens Friday

In the same way that we North Americans pop off to Mexico or the Caribbean, folks here in France find Morocco an easy, exotic and relatively inexpensive getaway. So I like to keep up with the hotel goings-on down there. And this week there's an exciting opening: Delano. It launches on Friday, September 21, and it's the first outpost of the wildly popular, Philippe Starck-designed hotel of the same name in Miami Beach. While other American-born boutique brands, such as W Hotels, have expanded worldwide and countless hoteliers have knocked off the distinctive all-white Delano look, the New York-based Morgan’s Hotel Group (MHG), has had just the one original Delano...until now.

The Delano Marrakech represents a joint venture between MHG and the Hivernage Collection. The new 73-suite hotel sits in the heart of the Hivernage district (also home to the Four Seasons and Le Meridien) and was designed by top French architect/designer Jacques Garcia. Garcia, as you stylish people certainly know, did the Hotel Costes and Royal Monceau in Paris, and more recently re-did the Mamounia (Marrakech) and the Danieli (Venice).  In Paris alone there are 20-plus chic hotels and restaurants associated with his name while his private clients include the likes of the Sultan of Brunei.

The Delano Marrakech has a Baroque interior combining precious marbles, draped velvet, and rare fabrics. The lobby boasts hand-carved detailing, a central rotunda and a retractable roof while guestrooms feature Moroccan lighting, painted headboards, city panoramas overlooking the Koutobia Mosque and Juliet balconies. The hotel has a 20,000-square-foot spa, three pools and several bars and lounges. A ''carefully curated'' selection of boutiques on the ground level include Louis Vuitton, La Perla, Missoni women’s collection and Tamengo jewelry.

And just as the Delano Miami had, for many years, retained high-profile French chef Claude Troisgros to oversee its food, the new hotel has not one but two internationally known, Michelin-starred chefs in charge of its restaurants: Michel Rostang (for the two French concepts) and Giancarlo Morelli for the Italian.

Rostang, who holds two Michelin stars at his namesake restaurant in Paris, is operating the all-day Gallerie, with a a classic-and-modern French menu, and the gastronomic French restaurant called Bon R. (Signing on Michelin-starred French chefs to oversee hotel food in Marrakech is definitely a trend...and I'm sure we'll be seeing more of it.) To handle the day to day cooking at the elegant 96-seat Bon R, Rostang chose Alexander Visciano and moved him down from Rostang Paris. 
 
Morelli’s restaurant Pomiroeu, meanwhile, was designed to ‘’a slice of old school Italian glamour to Marrakech.’’ When Morelli is back at his one-star Pomiroeu in Milan, Fabio Moriconi, who has worked with him for seven years, will be in charge. 

Delano's executive chef is Foued Amri, who came over from the Four Seasons Marrakech and was cooking at La Mamounia before that. The hotel's general manger/director is Aziz Bendriss, who was last working at the Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park.

Morgans Hotel Group was founded by Ian Schrager, with the opening of Morgans Hotel on Madison Avenue in New York, in 1984. The Royalton and The Paramount followed. The Delano on Miami Beach opened in 1995, after a total re-do of a 1947 art deco hotel, also called The Delano. MHG went public in 2006 and now owns or operates 13 properties worldwide, with signed deals for ten new hotels under the Delano, Mondrian and Hudson brands. The target is to have open ten Delanos, five Hudsons, and ten to 15 Mondrians by 2020. Meanwhile the next Delano is slated to open in Las Vegas before year’s end, followed by the Delano Moscow in 2015.

Rates at Delano Marrakech begin at $330/€251 and special packages are available. For more info or to book, click here or call 800-606-6090 (U.S.) or 00 800 4969 1770 (International).  

Photos: A rendering of the Delano and a guestroom.

Jewish Food in France

A couple years ago, my friend Joan Nathan, a Washington, D.C.-based food writer and author, called and said she was coming to France, doing research for a new book. I snapped to attention, not just because I love Joan but also because I loved the topic: Jewish food in France. Joan was looking for cooks, stories, recipes, family lore, historical documents--anything that would help her piece together a rich and compelling narrative.

"Who can you introduce me to?" she asked. "Where should we go and what should we eat?" 

France has the third largest Jewish community in the world (about 600,000) and luckily I know quite a few wonderful Jewish cooks in Provence, thanks partly to the Association Culturelle Juive des Alpilles, a group I belong to in St. Remy. (From Joan’s book I learned that St. Remy had a flourishing Jewish community until the 14^th century.) With about 50 families as members, the ACJA hosts educational, social and religious events throughout the year, drawing both Jews and non-Jews from throughout the region.  

My first call was to my sweet friend Michelle Victor, an elegant Parisian attorney now living and working in Provence, and next thing I knew, she and Jocelyne Akoun (another ACJA member) were planning a traditional Algerian-Jewish feast for Joan and me and a few other very lucky guests. It was an astoundingly good meal, which we devoured course by spicy, savory, sweet course, all spread out around the large coffee table in the Akoun's beautiful home, which they run as a B&B, called La Cigale et La Fourmi.

As we ate, Jocelyne and her husband Hubert provided a crash course in the Sephardic Jewish culinary traditions of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. "Jews were in North Africa before the Arabs," Hubert told us. "Some Jews arrived when the first temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and have lived there ever since." Others, Joan adds, were converted Berbers or came from Spain during the inquisition.

(Jocelyne, as it turns out, grew up in a Turkish-Spanish family that lived in Algeria for many years before immigrating to Marseille. In her dishes we tasted the influences of each culture and were lucky enough to have the Akouns as expert guides. Joan was as impressed as I was and she used three of Jocelyne’s recipes in the book.)

Thanks to the Akouns and all the other good people who opened their homes, hearts and recipe files, Joan has produced a wonderful book encapsulating 2,000 years of Jewish cooking in France. I am so impressed by her work and I’m clearly not alone; the book was released in late November and immediately found its way onto all the “Best Cookbooks of the Year" lists. This is Joan's 10th book and if I could find the right Yiddish word for “something to be extremely proud of,” I would use it here.

Whether your interest is Jewish culture, French history, culinary traditions or just good food, this is one book you’ll want to own. Joan takes us into kitchens in Paris, Alsace and the Loire Valley; she visits the bustling Belleville market in Little Tunis in Paris; she celebrates Sabbath and other special holidays. And all across France, she finds that Jewish cooking is more alive than ever.

So what exactly is Jewish French food?

“It’s everything you don’t think it is,” Joan says. For example?

“The French are known for sauces but Kosher law forbids cream with meat,” she writes. “Jews who observe the dietary laws can’t have oysters or escargot. But they took regional specialties like quiche lorraine, made with ham or lardons mixed with cream, and instead created onion quiche, vegetable quiche and even tarte flambé--all without the ham.

“In France there are many distinctly Jewish dishes such as a roast shoulder of lamb or eggplant dishes like shakshuka or papeton d’aubergines, an eggplant gratin,” she continues. “And it varies widely depending on the region from which the Jews came: Provence, Alsace, the Southwest, Eastern Europe, Spain and North Africa. In many cases they brought distinctly Jewish dishes and integrated them with the ingredients they found in their new homes.”  

In the south, for example fougasse is an old Jewish Sabbath bread as well as a distinctly Provencal bread. Pot au feu in Alsace is used by Jews for Shabbat and the holidays. And then there’s foie gras; Jews adapted it to make chopped liver, using the goose fat in their dishes and selling the quills and feathers for a living.

“They needed that fat in their dishes because they didn’t use lard,” Joan explains.

About a quarter of the 300,000 Jews in France before World War II died in the Holocaust and others later left for Israel or the U.S. But as independence came to the former French colonies of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many more Jews emigrated to France. And the customs they brought came to define French Jewish food as well. Many Sephardic dishes, in fact, actually have centuries-old roots here in southwestern France and Catalonia, from before the time that Jews were expelled and settled in North Africa.

“Jewish cooks in France still use the ingredients of those ancestors — anise, olive oil, rosewater, and pine nuts — reimagined on stovetops in Marrakesh, Oran and Tunis,” Joan writes.

It’s all the personal stories in the book, however, that bring the food to life. One elderly man Joan interviewed was busy at work on his own book, about his relatives who descended from the Juifs du Pape. Those were the Jews in the Comtat Venaissin--the present day Vaucluse region which includes Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon and L’Isle sur le Sorgue--who were protected in the Middle Ages by the Pope. He regaled Joan with stories about his ancestors, such as the 13^th-century yeshiva (religious school) teacher who was also a truffle hunter selling his precious finds at the Carpentras fair.

Later, Joan visited the four protected towns and les carrières, the cobblestoned quarters or ghettoes where Jews were forced to live for centuries. Of course she found that much more moving, having met people with very personal ties to this chapter in French history.

Despite her straightforward take on the bleakest chapters of the Jewish experience in Europe, Joan’s book is a joyful celebration of a vibrant and complex cuisine, told through the stories and recipes of those who’ve shaped it, preserved it and who will (one hopes) carry it forward. It’s a wonderful read whether you cook from it or not. And the Jewish sense of humor definitely comes through. In fact, Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous reminded me of that great one-liner about the history of the Jewish people:

The history of the Jews? That’s easy: They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!

Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France (Knopf) is available in bookstores and from Amazon here. Joan’s website is here. Her email is: nathan4221@aol.com.  She’s also on Twitter and on  Facebook. Hubert and Jocelyne Akoun run their very-special St. Remy home as a B&B called La Cigale et La Fourmi.  For more info on the Association Culturelle Juive des Alpilles contact Elio Lussato (artist.elio@orange.fr or lussato.acti@wanadoo.fr ) or Hubert Akoun (hubertakoun@free.fr). Elio speaks French only; Hubert speaks English.

Moroccan Hotel Fit for Royalty

When the King—any King--opens a hotel, you don’t exactly expect a Travelodge, Days Inn or Formule 1. Yet even by royal standards, the Royal Mansour is a beauty.

The King in this case is His Majesty the King Mohamed VI of Morocco and the hotel, the Royal Mansour in Marakech, was developed to be one of the world’s finest. It opened in July, with 53 individual riads, three restaurants and a 27,000-square-foot spa, all spread over eight acres. Built into the ancient city walls, the Royal Mansour was meant to re-create a historical medina, with Andalusian-style courtyards, winding alleyways, and spectacular water displays. The art throughout is from both popular and up-and-coming Moroccan artists.

And since no ordinary chef would do for King M6, as he’s known, Michelin three-star chef Yannick Alléno of Le Meurice in Paris was lured into being the “advisor chef.” Alléno will stay on at the Meurice but will travel back and forth to Marrakech, leaving chef Jerôme Videau (previously of the Sofitel Paris Le Faubourg) in charge while he’s away. The hotel’s general manager Jean Pierre Chaumard was at the Royal Palm (on Mauritius) for 20 years.

The pampering begins the moment you step off your plane. A staff member greets you at the airport, serves drinks while your passport formalities are being sorted out and then whisks you off to the hotel in a Mercedes, free of charge.

The Royal Mansour has some serious competition of course, most notably the legendary La Mamounia, reopened in September 2009 after a three year $160-million redo.

Rates at the Royal Mansour, a member of Leading Hotels of the World, begin at 1500€ per night. For info, click here or here. Or, you can email (experience@royalmansour.com) or call (Marrakech phone) 1 + 212 (0)529 80 80 80. RyanAir and Royal Air Maroc both fly between Marseille and Marrakech; Royal Air Maroc flies to Morocco from Nice, Montpellier and Toulouse as well.

The Rebirth of Mamounia

The legendary Mamounia Hotel re-opened in Marrakesh last month following an extensive three-year €120-million restoration by French architect and interior designer Jacques Garcia. The powerful Moorish architecture is unchanged but Garcia's signatures--strong use of light, color and theatrical perspective--are evident throughout. The hotel now looks like the gorgeous Oriental palace it once was.

Built in 1923, "Mamou" has hosted a global roster of the rich and famous; Winston Churchill declared it “the most lovely spot in the whole world” and regularly used it as his winter quarters. His granddaughter is still said to be a regular visitor.

In its newest incarnation, Mamounia has two restaurants headed by Michelin star chefs: L’Italien (run by Alfonso Iaccarino of Don Alfonso 1890 in Sant’ Agata, Italy) and Le Francais (headed by Jean-Pierre Vigato of Apicius, Paris). A third restaurant, Le Marocain, is set in a modern Moroccan pavilion within the hotel’s lush gardens. Mamounia’s exec chef is Fabrice Lasnon, former exec chef at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski in Berlin: the GM is Didier Picquot, from Lyford Cay Members Club in the Bahamas.

The gardens, noted for their ancient olive groves and wide array of flora, cover almost 20 acres and date to the 18th century when they were given to the Prince as a wedding gift.

Rounding out the amenities are a pool and pool restaurant, five bars, a fitness pavillion, tennis and a 27,000-sq.-ft. spa where you can indulge in 80 different treatments.

La Mamounia has 136 rooms, 71 suites and three Riads, each with three bedrooms and private pool. Rates begin at €512.

To get there: Ryan Air flies from Marseille to Marrakech. Easy Jet flies from Paris and Lyon to Marrakech. Royal Air Maroc flies from Paris direct to Marrakech and from Marseilles to Marrakech, via Casablanca. Transavia flies from Paris to Marrakesh.

For info: http://www.mamounia.com/